Nikolai1

Non-duality and duality aren't paths. They are interpretations of pure spiritual experience of the divine. To talk about meeting God or becoming one with God are the same. One doesn't build upon or enhance the other.

Bindi you are right not to place non-duality above duality. Both are the same. To see one as higher is a grave error. It means we are still falling for one-sided interpretations of experience.

I have the same thing with a woman who I love but who lives in a different country, but we never did any kind of practice. It is just a natural connection that distance can't affect.

What I meant was: the kind of person who can come to such a stunning and radical conclusion is the kind of person who has had to spend a lot of time doubting. Doubting, at first, clears the decks. Then we see that even the doubt is just more thought.

But you need to doubt the first thought before you can recognise the second thought as doubt.

I know exactly what you mean. It's a bit like what you can see when your eyes are full of tears and you look at the light. You see the beams shining out 360 degrees, and if you play with your focus then the beams wil lengthen and shorten. Now, light always looks like this. It is my natural gaze. I notice it the most with car headlights on a dark night. I've also noticed that reflective things are more reflective. If there is a puddle at the foot of a tree, I see two clear trees immediately. It is my immediate impression; and I do not have to specifically look for the reflection to notice it. This reminds me of a Zen proverb: The birds are flying in the ocean And the fish are swimming in the sky.

Yes of course, good point, although the same problem still occurs. We still need a lot of self-awareness before we are in a position to understand our dreams. Also, in terms of impact, there is a big difference between meeting the anima in your dreams and meeting her psychoid form in reality. I wonder if Jung ever talked about this? Perhaps the dream is a kind of intimation of what is coming - a kind of preparation?

Bindi I do share your interest in phenomena that might be called 'milestone experiences'. They differ so widely, but I think they come in two broad categories: a) Things appearing as objects, that others can't see. This is a beautiful example of where the objective and the subjective have merged. They are distinctly seen, but it must be admitted at the same tim that they are for our eyes only. The blue pearl is like this. b Objects taking on highly subjective traits. Everyone in the car can see the daffodil at the side of the road, but only you can see it 'from the inside'. Only you have kinship with the flower, know its thoughts and feel its essence. You know the flower just as you know yourself. I think genuine milestone experiences all fit into one of the two categories. When a bunch of people all go to a talk and listen to some meditation about how to see some blue pearl, it is guaranteed that they will see it before long. But this is just business as usual. The blue pearl jus becomes part of the shared world, and as a sight, is no different that going to Sydney in the hope of seeing the Opera House. Of course it will happen! But when a true milestone happens to us, completely out of the blue and not at all suggested to us...then it marks progress and is tremendously exciting. How can it not be? We are only human!

I must admit I feel a little uneasy at the way you discuss them. This stuff is basically undescribable; and therefore wll vary widely in how it gets described. If you try and turn this into some sort of empirical enquiry - like a kind of science - you will certainly miss the mark.

When we are in deep meditation we lose our sense of self. Interpretation of our experience therefore changes. We all have a darkness when we close our eyes. In meditation this inner darkness can suddenly feel like outer darkness. It feels like we are travelling through a realm as dark, as vast and as endless as outer space itself. The light does not literally lie at the end of this darkness. But once the light is known, we see that the darkness was the darkness of unknowing...the 'cloud of unknowing' as the famous phrase goes. All sorts of normally known sights and sounds can become strange and unknown when we see them through the eyes that are not our usual eyes.

I think that the fourth thing is always a unique moment that can't be talked about.. It is the physical expression of the understanding of the trinity...but on the surface it will always look like one of the pairs of opposites. The fourth therefore looks like the first and the second.

Hi Yueya A while back I asked this. It seems that Jung goes some way to answering that in your quote: I think the change inside us comes when we stop viewing the events in our life as just random things we encounter, and start viewing them as meaningful opportunites, peculiar to us, which can lead to further growth. We can see them as being 'trials sent by God' or we can see them as archetypes produced from our unconscious which we need to accept and assimilate. For example, for most of our life we might a particularly annoying type of person who always gets to us. Our strategy is to avoid people of his type, or treat him in such a way that ensures he stays clear of us. We may tell him what we think of him, and feel justified in doing so. The change comes when we start to see this same person as some kind of envoy, something mysterious that is particularly charged with meaning. Now it would feel like bad faith to either avoid him or attack him, we realise that he is our shadow and must be faced. So I guess what I think is that archetypes are always a part of our life. But until we view them as archetypes, they can't be approached and treated as archetypes and we can't benefit from the encounter with them. We may meet our shadow 25 times before we realise that we are on the quest, thus only the 26th encounter is with the shadow. So understanding our lifelong shadow is always a retropsective thing. I suppose this means that some kind of self-transendence is necessary before the archetypes can be recognised. It is almost like we need to view our whole life with a kind of irony. or detachment. We need to be able to see our life as a kind of story which we watch unfold. And in that story certain caricatures will appear and we can wait for them and expect them. This change to the detached observer of the story mode is so obviously a spiirtual awakening of sorts. There must be loads of Jungians and analysts who have simply never gone through this. It's no wonder that Jung still plays a minor role compared to Freud. Freud didn't require any of this from us!

Very true, we must give unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

Actually to be crystal clear...a coin has three sides and one edge.

I love this a lot! What an incredible way to sum it up, and really gets people thinking!

There is a kind of investigation that is post-scientific. We still continue to seek truth, but we know that the nature of the truth we seek cannot be shared. It must apply itself only to us. Once found, it may be expressed and shared, but only as a creative event that will either inspire the other or not. We may not attempt to legitimise it as a truth that exists regardless of our audience's opinion. I think this is why Jung is so hard to understand. He was speaking abour processes that we can only possibly understand once we have passed through the same. He was a scientist, that had passed beyond science. The trouble is, I think most people who try and understand him approach him as scientists, and approach the scientist in Jung.

Sorry to break up this fascinating discussion, but I want to go back to the OP... Uniting the opposites need not be understood as acquiring a brand-new perspective to complement our former single-mindedness. Rather, once the union has been achieved, we realise that both aspects of the pair were always perceived, but we weren't conscious of one of them. Union therefore comes when we raise something unconscious to the level of consciousness. A good example is our sense of mortality. Our usual position is to think that we are a person who will live for a certain span of time and then die. But unconsciously we know that this isn't the case, we just don't have any kind of intellectual handle on this bizarre truth. This descrepancy between unconscious knowledge of our immortality and conscious knowledge of our mortality manifests at the conscious level as an emotion. It is an emotion because it falls short of being knowledge. The emotion is, of course, fear. If there wasn't this conscious/unconscious discrepancy we would accept our conscious version of events (mortality) without any emotion. Our death would be a fact that just IS...like granite simply IS hard and the rose petal simply IS soft. But this particular pair of opposites requires resolution; and fear, just like any negative emotion, is the objective evidence of that. The fear is both the result of the discrepancy, and the process by which we resolve it. Fear of death is produced because of the existence of that part of us that knows we cannot die, and needs this to come to the light. How do we come to know that our fear of death is groundless? Put simply, we need to consciously BE that part of us that does not die. This is the true aim of all spiritual practice. When we experience that transcendent self which is the container, we come to see that death is not real and is only ever a monentary thought-form within the container that we are. Gradually our fear of death withers away, and yet paradoxcially, we never deny that our bodies will die. The event that we formerly feared is still 100% guranteed to happen, but in our wisdom we know that it is not such a big deal. We will live on. We will both die and survive. We are mortal and immortal. This is the end of fear, and the union of this particular pair of opposites.

There is something very profound in this post, thank you! But what happens in this scenario? We have a view of ourselves as individuals in time and space (thesis). Through meditation we see that we are also silent witnesses in which time and space occur in us (antithesis) Our selfhood seems to be neither in space and time, out of it, both or neither (synthesis) How does this sttange paradoxical synthetic sense of ourselves start to manifest in reality? Is is just the same way as it always has when we took ourselves to be egos with a will that operates within constraints? Or is it something different? (Bear in mind that lots of people discover their witness self, but they do not manage to synthesise with their egoic self. They simply stay at the thesis / antithesis level of opposites where ego is now false self and witness is true self.)

Yes absolutely! But something interesting happens psychoologically speaking. We are only prepared to see that we are in denial about ourselves IF the shadow has already in some degree dispersed. It takes great self-confidence to face up to the fact that we aren't who we thought we were. It is mortifying in every sense of the word - I mean it is as threatening as death. Before we are ready, we may often get told by others that we are in denial about who we are, being hypocritical and so on...but it is literally impossible for us to see it. We must conclude that they are just plain wrong for making that judgment, and they need to be told. From the position of the more aware person, the anger we show is the firmest possible evidence that the criticism was justified. But from the unaware position, anger is merely the means by which we correct wrongs...our anger is a necessary virtue. We all notice this in life. It may be clear to us that someone is in denial, but they cannot and will not agree with you. So we must accept that the shadow as a concept, may well be indistinguishable from our ego for much of our life. It is a very. very difficult concept to understand because it looks different in every single person, it is idiosyncratic...but it is also the thing that it is hardest for the individual to see in themselves. Who can see it therefore? Only the person who has truly confronted their own shadow will be able to accurately perceive it in others. If they haven't done this, then another person's shadow will be obscured by their own.

Everything we think about our own self has its opposite, and in our practice these must be reconciled and transcended. One of the most fundamental aspects of our identity is our gender - male or female. Over time we have absorbed all the traits of our gender, and come to assume that they are stable facts about who we are. As we come to realise that our true nature is genderless, we are able to allow expressions that we normally associate with the opposite gender. Likewise, we may learn not to automatically produce the stereotyped 'male' response (if we are men). As this process continues, the dynamic tension between the two gender concepts disperses. As men we are no longer fascinated by the outer expression of our own femininity - the woman. Whatever woman is, we are, and our sense of gender demarcating our reality is lost. One obvious result of this is sexual disinterest - a naturally occurring celibacy. The person who has discovered the true nature could not perform the sexual act. Not only would it seem to them something wholly unneccessary, they would be impotent. The union of the genders, which is one aspect of the purpose of humanity, has already been acheived in themselves. No progeny are required to pick up where they left off. This is one example, but it shows just how challenging a thoroughgoing union of the opposites is. Though we accept that celibacy may be our portion in extreme old age, how many of us reallly want this to happen in the prime of life? Those who do, often try to unite the opposed genders as as act of will - deliberate celibacy. This will be doomed to failure unless it is a part of a honest, sincere and broad ranging strategy to realise our true (genderless) self. Only this discovery will give us the confidence to shed one of the most essentially defining aspects of our ego - our gender.

I've noticed two types of shadow material: The first kind is easy. We start by assuming a thing is bad or wrong and so we naturally avoid it and we are totally conscious of doing so. We address this when we come to realise that the thing isn't so bad, and that are life would be enriched if it got included in our life more. The second kind is much harder. This is when we think something is very good, and because we think its good we assume that we are an obvious examplar of this in our lives. For example, a woman might think that it is very good and correct to spend lots of time playing with her kids and pride herself on being this kind of person. As she confronts her shadow she starts to see that she always avoids playing with the kids and usually pressurises her husband into doing it...usually with the'you must spend more time playing with the kids' argument. When we see this second kind in ourselves it is really mortifying and disorientating. It takes so much awareness to even see it. Our shadow is masquerading very convincingly as what we think of as our best traits.

Centertime Yes, the problem presents itself in both these ways to me. To lose your way in the world is to lose touch with the thing that steers you in the world. The thing that steers us, I call the ego. When this starts to get dismantled by spiritual practice it dissolves. You can no longer make a good stable connection with a dissolving thing, and you can no longer use it as a lens through which to adequately approach the world. I feel very aware that I need to re-connect with self somehow. But the self I connect with and the manner of the connection is totally obscure to me at this time. If it could be rationally deduced, I would have deduced it. Also, one other important point. I talk about the dissolution of the ego. Actually it isn't totally dissolved. i notice it particularly in the form of its old aversions. I have no choice but to continue with its dissolution by facing up to things that I have avoided. Were I to keep on avoiding, the ego would keep going. This is what I call confronting the shadow, which is a Jungian concept. Thanks for your thoughts!

Brian - is The Chariot your year card? Yes it is - just checked!

Brian Do you mean that you share the same traits I write about in myself?

Hi Michael, Just yesterday I had a rather stunning insight which I think will help me. I was talking to a friend who noticed that when I write I often use the accusative (you do this too much, you need to understand this etc) when using collectives such as we or one would be more effective as it comes across as less 'preachy'. I explained that I was aware of this but for some reason I don't want to stop. I want to use the accusative. He said that I'm therefore using the 'you' as a projection. The you I address in debate is actually the me and the more I use it the more i myself learn the lesson that I seek to impart, This really lit a lightbulb and made me see how 'the other's is nothing other than myself in disguise. Very Jungian, and very useful when it comes to the task of confronting the shadpw, which I think is the way forward for me.